Universalisms in Conflict – Post-Colonial Challenges in Art History and Philosophy
Freitag, 09. März 2012 - 14:00 Uhr
Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Datum | 09.03.2012 - 10.03.2012
Ort | Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien, M13
Symposium veranstaltet vom Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften
Konzept: Christian Kravagna, Ruth Sonderegger
Teilnehmer_innen | Chika Okeke-Agulu, Fahim Amir, Sabeth Buchmann, Marina Gržini?, Monica Juneja, Jens Kastner, Christian Kravagna, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Marion von Osten, Ruth Sonderegger, Isobel Whitelegg, Franz Wimmer
Die westliche Kunstgeschichte hat vor kurzem begonnen, die Herausforderungen der kulturellen Globalisierung zu diskutieren. Neue und oft konkurrierende Konzepte wie "World Art Studies" und "Global Art History" zeugen von den Anstrengungen zur Überwindung des zunehmend eingestandenen Eurozentrismus der Disziplin durch Ausweitung ihres Gegenstandsbereichs auf andere Weltregionen. Die Rhetorik der "neuen Herausforderungen" und einer notwendigen "neuen Orientierung" der Kunstgeschichte übersieht jedoch häufig die politischen Dimensionen der anti- bzw. postkolonialen Kritik von Geschichtsschreibung. Alternative Modelle, basierend auf Fallstudien spezifischer Konstellationen in transkulturellen Kontaktzonen, sind imstande, tiefere Einsichten in die interkontinentalen künstlerischen und diskursiven Beziehungen unter kolonialen und postkolonialen Bedingungen zu ermöglichen. Das Symposium versammelt ausgewählte Fallstudien in postkolonialer Kunstgeschichte; es diskutiert Kriterien, Begriffe und Methoden der Auswahl und Untersuchung solcher Beispiele, die als relevant und paradigmatisch für kritische Revisionen etablierter Kanons und Narrative der modernen Kunst sowie vorherrschender Konzepte von Zentrum und Peripherie verstanden werden. Das Symposium erinnert darüber hinaus an Projekte und Diskussionen, die den gegenwärtigen Debatten über "globale" und/oder post-eurozentrische Kunstgeschichten voraus gingen.
Die westliche Philosophie war seit ihren Anfängen von universalistischen Ansprüchen geprägt. Ihrem Begehren nach Einheit zum Trotz war die okzidentale Philosophie jedoch nie ein vollkommen eindimensionales Projekt. Kritische Stimmen aus den eigenen Reihen haben die universalistischen Ansprüche der Philosophie immer wieder herausgefordert - in der jüngeren Vergangenheit insbesondere auch Kritik aus der Perspektive der Dekolonisierung. Gleichzeitig sind universalistische Forderungen aber auch immer wieder integraler Bestandteil emanzipatorischer Kämpfe gewesen, nicht zuletzt von anti-imperialistischen und antikolonialen Kämpfen. Deshalb kann das Denken, Handeln und Kämpfen im Namen universalistischer Prinzipien nicht einfach als ideologisch ad acta gelegt werden. Doch es bleibt ein von Gewalt durchsetztes Faktum, dass die westliche Philosophie sich kaum mit den dekolonialen Affirmationen, Variationen, Weiterentwicklungen und Zurückweisungen okzidentaler Philosophie befasst hat. Deshalb stellt unsere Konferenz genau solche Begegnungen und ihre zeitgenössischen Herausforderungen ins Zentrum. Darüber hinaus geht es um die Frage, ob postkoloniales Philosophieren in ähnlich spezifischen Konstellationen praktiziert wird, wie sie oben für die Kunstgeschichte skizziert wurden.
Ruth Sonderegger
Christian Kravagna
Friday, March 9
Moderation: Sabeth Buchmann and Christian Kravagna
14:00
Introduction
14:15
Isobel Whitelegg
Towards the Invisible: Signals London 1964-66
My paper approaches the short history of the Signals London gallery by focusing on the distinctive perspective on international artistic practice that was developed by its publishing and curatorial activities. Between November 1964 and October 1966, Signals occupied a prominent "showroom" on the corner of Wigmore Street in central London. A series of comprehensive one-person exhibitions were realized alongside collective shows that assembled and related work by artists of generations, nationalities, and tendencies that were and are more commonly comprehended discretely. Since the 1990s Signals London has come to renewed attention. Artists whose work the Signals gallery and its Newsbulletin introduced for the first time in Britain - for example
Lygia Clark or Alejandro Otero - are now seen as precursors to a global contemporary practice. It is the aim of this paper to address the distinction between the conditions under which Signals has entered our horizons more recently and those under which an interest in certain artists emerged from its particular perspective on post-war art.
Isobel Whitelegg is Curator of Public Programmes at Nottingham Contemporary. She was previously director of the MA Curating Programme at Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London (UAL), and continues to be an associate of TrAIN, UAL's center for research on transnational art. She writes regularly on modern and contemporary art with a particular emphasis on art and artists in Brazil, and has curated exhibitions in collaboration with artists including Nicolás Robbio and Cinthia Marcelle. She completed her MA (1998) and PhD (2005) in art history and theory at the University of Essex, specializing in modern and contemporary art from Latin America. Ongoing areas of research include the presence and critical reception of Latin American art in England, and the critical history of the Bienal de São Paulo (see "The Bienal de São Paulo Unseen/Undone, 1969/81" Afterall #22, Autumn 2009, and "Brazil, Latin America, The World," Third Text vol 26, issue 1, Feb 2012).
15:45
Marion von Osten
L' Art Autre
Until 1989, French art history, and Western art history, in general have conceptualized visual art practices in the frame of two radical changes in geopolitical conditions: the hour "zero" as a radical rupture after WWII, and the binary systemic-level competition of capitalism / socialism, the so-called Cold War. What if art history writing that defines contemporary art in the post-war era within this framework reflected the geopolitical conditions of the empires' decline and the anti-colonial project as a third major geopolitical condition? Would this create a counter-narrative, of even Western art movements, such as the universal language of post-war abstraction? What if we include transnational encounters and transfers of ideas by the many actors who passed through and influenced the Paris art scene in the 1950s and 60s, and created - when leaving Paris - avant-garde movements and art institutions in non-Western localities? With these reflections, I would like to question the Eurocentric historicization of the movement of post-war abstraction, which was constituted and diversified by a multitude of artists from around the globe, within diasporic journeys and translocal conditions in the short century of decolonization and beyond.
Marion von Osten is an artist, curator, and theorist of culture and the arts as well as Professor for Art and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Education in the Arts, Vienna. Her research, writing, and projects are concerned mainly with changed production conditions for cultural work in neo-liberal societies, technologies of the self, and the governance of mobility as well as questions of aesthetics and politics. Her latest curatorial projects include: "In the Desert of Modernity: Colonial Planning and After" at the House of World Cultures Berlin; "reformpause," Kunstraum of the University of Lüneburg (2006); "Atelier Europa," Kunstverein Munich, "Be Creative! The Creative Imperative!" Museum for Design, Zurich (2003); the transdisciplinary research project TRANSIT MIGRATION (2003-5); and "Projekt Migration" (2003-2006), an initiative of the federal foundation of Germany on the history of migration in post-war Germany.
17:30
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Art History and Globalization
Faced with the challenge of postcolonial globalization, art historians have in recent times grappled with the idea and modalities of a global art history. The paper sounds a cautionary note on this question, by pointing out the hazard of what seems to be Western art historians' desire to elide the differences of language, focus, and methods of art histories which the recent visibility of art and artists from elsewhere has made manifest. Drawing from African art history, the paper examines some of the intellectual and ideological questions confronting a global art history. It proposes that to imagine the possibility of a truly global art history is to anticipate an overhaul or relativization of normative/Western art history's core assumptions. Put differently, our awareness of the multiplicity of histories of art suggests that global art history, to be meaningful, will have to be, fundamentally, comparative art history.
Chika Okeke-Agulu is an art historian, curator, and artist. He is the author (with Okwui Enwezor) of Contemporary African Art Since 1980, and co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. He is assistant professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology and Center for African American Studies, Princeton University.
19:00
Monica Juneja
Beyond Backwater Arcadias - Globalized Locality as a Site of Cosmopolitan Practice
My paper underlines the migrant trajectories of objects and practices that make up the aesthetic category of modernism to argue for a transcultural approach to concepts that do not forever remain rooted to their parochial (Western) points of origin; instead, they undergo processes of translation and reconfiguration in new settings. Research on these, however, is itself inhibited by institutional compartmentalization within the humanities, which often follows the logic of national or regional boundaries. Using the example of South Asia, I will address the specific histories and local contingencies of the concept of aesthetic modernism as it navigated a particular set of subjectivities produced by colonization and modern globalization. The quest for artistic selfhood involved a transformative negotiation of a staggering variety of codes available to postcolonial artists for whom the local was both a site to be recuperated from the constellation of empire and simultaneously a communitarian straitjacket, freedom from which was made possible by a globally constituted cosmopolitanism. The ways in which expressive forms and media initiatives - the masquerade, reciprocal mimicry, or performative excess on the one hand and the interfaces between image-making and activism on the other - form a nexus with the quest for artistic selfhood beyond the predicament of being always "somebody's other" (Rustom Bharucha) calls for a more open conceptual articulation. Such practices, I argue, are built into processes of transculturation and their investigation, and adequate theorization would mean transcending the ideological rhetoric of an avant-garde committed to privileging the "new." The availability of new sites of cultural action beyond the West crucial to contemporary art have not only meant a challenge to the premises of the phenomenon avant-garde as it becomes global; they have the potential of stimulating alternative ways of reimagining art. The challenge to art history now is to sharpen its conceptual tools and create a language to provide such practices with a disciplinary anchor.
Monica Juneja holds the Chair of Global Art History at the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context," University of Heidelberg. She has been Professor at the University of Delhi, held visiting professorial positions at the Universities of Hannover, Vienna, and Emory University. Her research and writing focus on transculturality and visual representation; disciplinary practices in the art history of Western Europe and South Asia; gender; and political iconography, Christianization and religious identities in early modern South Asia. Her publications include Peindre le paysan. L'image rurale dans la peinture française de Millet à Van Gogh (1998), Architecture in Medieval India. Forms, Contexts, Histories (Reader South Asia. Histories and Interpretations, 2001), The lives of objects in pre-modern societies (2006, edited with G. Signori), BildGeschichten. Das Verhältnis von Bild und Text in den Berichten zu außereuropäischen Welten (2008, with B. Potthast), Religion und Grenzen in Indien und Deutschland: Auf dem Weg zu einer transnationalen Historiographie (2009, edited with M. Pernau,) and most recently: "Global Art History and the 'Burden of Representation,'" in Hans Belting et al (eds), Global Studies. Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (2011). She is working on a monograph tentatively entitled Can Art History Be Made Global? A Discipline in Transition. She edits the series Visual and Media Histories (Routledge), is theme editor of the Encyclopedia of Asian Design (Berg), and member of the editorial board of Transcultural Studies.